History’s problem is how one party becomes agent of universality

Evidence

Why is it that only one of these two parties can be the agent of universality? That, for Augustin Thierry, is the problem of history. And his analysis therefore consists in tracing the origins of a process that was dualistic when it began, but both monist and universalist when it ended. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 7653

Categorization

• DEFINE: The core historiographic mechanism: a struggle that begins dualistic (two parties) ends monist/universalist (one party claims universality) — useful scaffold for how colonial discourse naturalizes one group’s universality.
• XREF: This directly feeds the toolkit item on representation and construction of the ‘Other’: one party becoming ‘the agent of universality’ is the mechanism by which the Other gets excluded from the universal. Carries into Orientalism. — connects to: The same mechanism that unites society also drives its historical change — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 1544; Acknowledging other just societies forces liberal democracy to renounce universalist claims — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 285; Rationalist-universalists hold political theory can establish one universally valid good regime — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 289
• QUESTION: Foucault opens a genuinely open question here — why one party alone can be ‘the agent of universality’ — worth chasing how this maps onto race-thinking and who gets left out of universal citizenship.